CFP: Writing the Queer Self (9/15/06; NEMLA, 3/1/07-3/4/07)

full name / name of organization:

Damion Clark

contact email:

damionrc@earthlink.net

Writing the Queer Self: Sex, Gender, and the Creation of Space in QueerLife Writing=20This panel seeks to examine the roles that the inclusion of queer sex andgender non-conformity in LGBT autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs play increating a unique rhetorical space for queer bodies. Additionally, thispanel will look at the ways that specifically queer life writing alters thelandscapes of literary biographies of LGBT authors, and the interpretationsof their works. Possible topics might include a reading of place that quee=rsex holds in Joe Orton=B9s diaries, his creation of a hyper-masculine andhyper-sexual persona, and how that influences John Lahr=B9s biography, andcurrent interpretations of Orton=B9s plays. One might do similar work with th=elife writing of Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, JeanetteWinterson, or Dorothy Allison. For example, what in Wilde=B9s autobiographica=lwriting explains the multiple tellings of his biography from Ellmann=B9s moretraditional work to Neil McKenna=B9s more sexualized Wilde to the 1997 filmWilde? Additional possibilities for exploration include coming out stories.How do the conventions of the genre function in relation/ opposition to mor=etraditional coming-of-age narratives? Finally, what is the larger culturaleffect of such queer self-creation as seen in the autobiographical works ofQuentin Crisp, Augusten Burrows, and David Sedaris?=20Send 300 word abstract with a short C.V. to Damion Clark at drclark_at_umd.eduby September 15, 2006. Accepted panelists must be, or become current member=sof NeMLA by October 15, 2006.